How Social media propaganda is manipulating your brain: Propaganda about propaganda

Main menu

Post navigation

Did “Fake News” have an impact or is this just propaganda too?

I prefer propaganda to describe the use of propaganda methods to influence others to adopt ones agenda. “Fake news”, however, describes a form of propaganda that grew rapidly in 2016. “Fake news” are stories produced to emotionally target selected groups in to an “outrage” response. They quickly Like and Share these fake stories, which ultimately generates clicks for selling advertising. Fake news has been around for years; Facebook itself noted that “fake news” was becoming a problem back in 2014. Our blog wrote publicly about fake news back in January of 2016.

Unlike propaganda, the purpose of “fake news” is not to persuade anyone to adopt an agenda – the primary goal is to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Propaganda is for persuasion while fake news is for making profits.

In the fall out from the election, the mainstream media found itself embarassingly out of sync with the voters and caught off guard by the election outcome. Rather than question why the media was out of touch, they have jumped on to the “fake news” meme. Their spin is that “fake news” caused people to be dumb and vote wrong.

Because the election outcome was different than the model, the media has adopted the view that the model was correct and something must be wrong with the real world.

It’s because Facebook has become a platform for the sort of fake news stories that helped elect Donald Trump

Fake news targeted both Clinton and Trump and some targeted political parties (rather than candidates). Fake news is targeted at people who already agree with the emotional sediments of the fake news item – thus, it is unclear that fake news had any influence on people voting differently than they already were planning to vote. Those who share fake news items on FB and Twitter appear to already have strongly held partisan views.

The “fake news” meme is itself a propaganda message, trying to persuade everyone that “fake news” caused a different election outcome than the media “elite” expected.

For example,

This time, it’s centered on “fake news”—the idea that Trump’s victory can be chalked up to phony right-wing news websites, which allegedly had an outsize presence on social media networks in the run-up to the election. As with “Bregret,” the obvious implication is that the election of Donald Trump is not a real rejection of the cosmopolitan establishment, because if voters actually understood their options, they would not have elected him.

In other words, we blame the voters for being dumb, but at least it was not their fault – it was the fault of “fake news”.

A major flaw in this assertion is that at least some of the partisan web sites are run by people who hold opposing political views to their target audience. To them, it is just a business. Paul Horner, for example, specifically targeted conservatives – strictly for business reasons, not ideology. On the other hand, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham owns one of the right wing fake news publishers and is under consideration for a White House job. On the flip side, the largest fake news publisher is the left wing Occupy Democrats for profit social media publisher.

Rather than attempt to understand why voters made the decisions they made, rather than understand why the media was out of touch, rather than examine why the pollsters were wrong – the new propaganda meme is to blame “fake news” as the culprit.

The media’s explanation du jour is that “fake news” spun the election (which assumes fake news was a right wing phenomena, in spite of tremendous left wing fake news too) and that Russia (identify a bogeyman) was behind this fake news (in spite of substantial evidence that fake news is the work of entrepreneurs in the U.S. and outside the U.S. seeking profits, not agendas):

What could be a time for useful introspection is regressing back to where we started – with fake stories about fake news, in an attempt to explain why the media were out of touch. The real world data is wrong and our original model was obviously correct, so the spin goes! By targeting Russia, the media pundits create a “bogeyman” (a classic propaganda technique) on which to focus the target’s attention.